Reflections…Welcome 2013, we face you with courage and great expectation!

New Skins for New Wine. Isaiah 43:18-21
Socrates that said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”
About 400 years later the apostle Paul wrote, “Examine yourself to see that you are in the faith. Test yourself. For Paul, the idea of being in the faith was accompanied by the parallel truth that as regenerated men we are filled with the fullness of Christ, and as a result of this fullness there is a fundamental transformation that takes place which impacts every part of our being and the very atmosphere in which we exist.

The question is, when we take a step back and look at this life that we live, the life that we lived in 2012, is there evidence of that.  And is that even an important question?
Well, for God it is. For God the manifest reality of the presence of His son in our lives is everything. If we were created for His pleasure. If our raw purpose on this earth is to be pleasing to Father, then without the presence of the Son we might as well just blow the whole thing up. God is so serious about it that He gave His Son up to a horrifying justice defying execution in order to fulfill a plan for the living presence of His son to come into us and live in us through the Holy Spirit so that in Him we may live and move and have our being.

Paul was not asking us to examine the success of our lives. He was not speaking of a job evaluation, of an inventory of blessings and gifts or how well we succeeded at last years resolutions. He was speaking of the presence. The evidence of our faith is that when God looks in our direction He sees the likeness of Jesus. The evidence of our faith is when God inhales in our presence He smells the fragrance of His Son.

We have to ask ourselves…In America today, why are there:

So many steeples yet so little change? So many sermons yet so few salvations? So many baptisms yet so few disciples?

In the state of the Union report in Time magazine a few years ago – in the State of the Union Report, one of the statistics quoted was that 95% of American men claim to be Christian. In the same magazine another article announced that in the same year 8.1 billion Dollars was spent on pornography. Now that means one of two things. Either we have an incredibly wealthy 5% or something is desperately wrong in the 95%.

I believe we need a transformation in our thinking along the lines of a ruthless self examination.

This kind of thinking can completely disturb the normalcy in a mans life. With this kind of thinking there is never any room for any personal ambition. This kind of thinking may necessitate a 180 degree change of mind. This kind of thinking will cause me to feint at the sudden realization of how desperately short of His Glory I have fallen, and how deep His grace must reach to bring me back to that place of His abiding and glorifying presence.
On the eve of this New Year I share with you a small but very significant chapter of my life.  This is not so that you may have more information about me, but so that somehow you will be able to see the potential when we miss this truth, for a man to be sincere, yet sincerely wrong, and the power of a living God to redirect and redeem that life when we come to a place of absolute surrender to His sovereignty and purpose. Because the question we will try to answer in a rather small way is “How’s a Man to Live?”

I woke up on the morning of June, 1983 feeling on top of the world. Just five years earlier in June of 1978 I had been woken from a spiritual slumber into the stark reality of the meaning of my salvation as a teenager. At 33 years of age I had retired on a country estate in one of the most beautiful regions in South Africa in the Magaliesburg Mountain Range. I had succeeded in the worlds eyes.

That particular morning I felt the strongest calling upon my heart to follow God wherever he would lead. I believed God had a great plan for my life that went beyond that which was immediately evidenced around us. I believed I knew what it was that my family and I were supposed to do.

Over the next 2 years this belief and calling would mean giving up those dearest to us. It would mean giving up a life of lavish and unlimited comfort and moving to a great country to become prepared to do great and wonderful things for God.

13 years later, the equivalent of two earned masters degrees behind my name, a PhD in theology, and a 7 year pastorate over a congregation that I committed to serve for the rest of my earthly days, I found myself alone one cold February morning running as hard as I could around my neighborhood block, tears virtually freezing on my cheeks, chanting a singular phrase over and over again, “one by one, step by step, we will make it right” “One by one, step by step, we will make it right” Just a few weeks earlier I was awakened to the realization that something had gone terribly wrong. Something that I knew with every breath and fiber of my being would have to be made right if I was to escape the tragedy that had become my existence.

My wife of 25 years had left me with our youngest and gone back to the place of our first calling. Our three oldest children that had been my pride and joy were alienated from me as a result. The church that I loved and served would have to be told that I could no longer be their pastor –  and there was not a reason in the world, in my mind, why any of that should have happened. After all, had I not made a supreme sacrifice in pursuit of this quest for God’s purpose in my life. Had I not done all that was required of me?

In the human logic, perhaps the resounding answer would have been “Yes, most worthy and honorable son, you have” “Oh, pity on you that you have been done so badly and treated so undeservedly”.

But God knew my heart. He knew me better than I knew myself. He knew that in spite of everything, no matter what it looked like on the outside, on the inside I was nowhere close to the person He had created me to be. The moment had come where the divine potter had compared the vessel being worked, with the model for which it was being formed after, and the difference was so great that only one thing would suffice. A total and complete breaking that would radically change the order of my life, my thinking, my will, and all the parts of my being!

The moment of reckoning had come. If I was not going to come to grips with the truth that I knew and taught so well and apply it to my own existence, He would hear and answer the cries of my best friend and life’s partner and bring about a series of events that would alter everything that I thought I was to be.

One of the most complex tasks of the man that seeks to live a changed life is the re-ordering of that life so that it becomes consistent with the character and the life of the one that has deposited within him the very substance of His nature and His being. The most frustrating tensions and difficulties that we face in our lives is because we have no notion to change the order of what we once were, but rather to introduce into that order the new man with his new desires to do good and please God in all of His ways.

Before long we begin to judge the situation based upon our own common sense and we justify our actions in contradiction to our conscience. The next step is that the conscience is dulled and the Spirits voice becomes quieted and we slip into the downward spiral. Oh how we must constantly check ourselves against that. To be in that place is the most miserable of existence.

In Luke 5:37 Jesus compared this with trying to put new wine into old wineskins. (read) To do this would not only damage the wine skin, but would also spoil the wine.

This is a warning that we cannot participate in the new things of the spirit without a fundamental change of our being taking place. If we do, our experiences, no matter how powerful or even life changing they may be will be short lived, resulting in spiritual tension and crisis.

The problem we have is the old wine skins. The old forms and structures will never contain the new things that God is longing to do in each of our lives. Paul reminds us of a vital principal of the new life in Christ: “Behold old things are passing away. Behold all things are becoming new.” And this must never stop. It can never stop. The rose that stops growing while in bud will die.

The resulting tensions are what most often causes us to be more miserable than before, and often ends up in a tragic life, the end of which could be marked by the words on the epitaph of our graves, “Here lies Gordon Goetsch. Saved soul, but wasted life”!

Transition.

Early in 1999, soon after Janice had left for Africa, I was invited to join a group of 7 pastors to fast and pray for the city of San Antonio for 21 days. I felt unworthy, and shared my thoughts with the other men, but felt at the same time that this too was a part of God’s plan. As we prayed for the city of San Antonio and for hearts to be changed and lives to be reordered after that spirit and nature of Jesus, one of the men began to pray a prayer something like this: “Father we pray for our brother Gordon. We cry out to you for his bride, Janice. Father we pray that you will draw her back to that place where she knows she belongs.” And then he began to weep. “Oh, God, we know where her place is as his wife, right now we have no idea where Gordon’s place is. Would you show him where his place is”!

You could have knocked me over with a feather! What does he mean “show me where my place is?” I knew where my place was, or so I thought. My place was to obey the call. My place was to go wherever He leads. My place was to preach and to teach and to lead revivals and to write books and to pastor a church, and to teach students and to sing songs and to go on mission trips! In the name of and for the glory of God? Suddenly I began to wonder if that was all true? Not the part about believing and following and serving and preaching…the part about the glory.

Was the motive behind everything that I had given my life to for these years really to glorify God?

I sang the songs with gusto…”Be glorified, be glorified….Be glorified…Be glorified..”   “In my life Lord, be glorified”

In my life He must be made great. In all I say do think feel and accomplish, He must be made famous!

That’s where I had missed it. I thought that there was still some room there for just a little bit of fame for Gordon.

I left that prayer meeting that morning as Father began to break my heart and the truth began to dawn on me, that where it really mattered, not much had changed since that day in June 1978 when Christ Jesus by the power of His indwelling Spirit retroactively by 2000 years, put to death the nature of Gordon Goetsch and implanted a new nature that was designed to bring about a glorious transformation of life and being, and to glorify Jesus. The problem was that no matter how dead the old nature was, there was still a mind that really had not been transformed and a heart that did not truly know brokenness, and there were many, many idols and high places in my life that I had held onto for far too long.

During those many cold mornings in February of 1999, Father was graciously depositing into my heart the desire for Him to finally have all and do all that it would take to bring me into that likeness that I truly had so longed for. I had no idea how, or where it would end, and I knew it would take some unraveling of a complicated and confused mind. But I also knew that God was faithful, to not only initiate the passion in my heart but also that He is faithful to keep that which I have committed to Him until the very end. In those weeks and months the breaking and molding continued. One by one the idols began to be destroyed.

During this time of my life Father taught me so many valuable lessons.

He showed me the priority of the quest is not necessarily the things that we would naturally rank that way… Obedience, devotion, sacrifice, service. The priority is to passionately pursue HIM.

To be emptied to the extent that every day there is a new resolve to volitionally, without inhibition, receive everything that is written in the heavenlies for my life today. In other words to embrace His Kingdom in the only way that Jesus said we could obtain it.

\”Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.\” Happy is the man who doesn\’t have anything and knows it. Happy is the man who does not have any standing before God Who does not have a long list of good deeds with which to plead his case, but blessed is the man who comes before God and says in the words of the songwriter,
\”Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to thy cross I cling,
Naked come to thee for dress,
Helpless look to thee for grace
Foul, I to the fountain fly
Wash me savior, or I die.”

Wash me of my quest for ambition, success, comfort, recognition, perfection, fame or fortune. These are things of man. God’s things are more of the heart. That is not to say that there is no place in your life for some of these “outcomes” of the ordered life. But they must never become the objective.

When these things become the objective the result for the saint is the most violent tension you can imagine. The tearing of soul and spirit. Confusion sets in. We begin to ask questions centered on what we can get away with and how far we can go before it’s a compromise.

And if that is the place we are at today, Father is calling us back to renewal. A renewal of heart, mind and soul. In a sense, a renewal to death. What a paradox… Needing to be empty in order to be full…needing to die in order that we might live…needing to give in order that we may receive…needing to humble in order that we may be lifted up…needing to be poor in order that we may be rich…needing to be last in order that we may be first…

This is the highest priority.. to know Him in such a profound intimate way that nothing else will cloud our vision of who He is.
Paul in 2 Cor 5:9 says “We make it our aim…to be well pleasing to Him.” It’s the difference between “Rightness” and “Righteousness”. “Rightness” is “Doing the “right” thing for God. “Righteousness” is God doing the “right” thing through me.
This will happen when we seek him with all of our hearts.

What it really comes down to is that through the crisis in my life, God initiated a new beginning.  I doubt any of us would deny, though the levels may vary, that we long for Father to initiate a new thing in our lives. A fresh encounter of some sorts. A greater depth of intimacy perhaps.

On the Eve of this New Year 2013 I’m going to invite you to do something courageous and even outrageous. I am going to ask you to invite Father to produce a New Work in your Hearts. To invest into your heart his purpose for your life. To invest into your heart His purpose for your family, for your Home, for your church, your community and in your City. And I am going to invite you to accommodate that New Work by giving up the Old Wine Skins and asking Father first to create in you a new heart. To put to death anything that is too stagnant and too perished and insufficient to hold what He is pouring out. 

And may this New Year be unlike any we have ever experienced. May the manifest presence of the living, eternal God of our Universe show up in our lives in such a way that the atmosphere around us would literally resonate with His presence and Glory.

THE WAY I WAS MADE
Caught In the half-light, I’m caught alone
Waking up to the sunrise and the radio
Feels like I’m tied, what’s holding me?
Just praying today will be the day I go free

I want to live like there’s no tomorrow
I want to dance like no one’s around
I want to sing like nobody’s listening

Before I lay my body down
I want to give like I have plenty
I want to love like I’m not afraid
I want to be the man I was meant to be
I want to be the way I was made

Made in Your likeness, made with Your hands
Made in Your likeness, made with Your hands
Made to discover who You are and who I am
All I’ve forgotten help me to find
All that You’ve promised let it be in my life

Written by Ed Cash, Jesse Reeves and Chris Tomlin